Mao made Machiavelli look benign. For example he understood that if your side was inevitably going to win, as some sort of Communism always would in China (because the USSR would provide whatever backing it took to make this so) then it wasn’t necessary to win every battle. Instead he engineered defeats, sacrificing large numbers of his own troops if necessary. His only requirement was that his ‘colleagues’ in the loose confederation of Communist factions would come off worse still. At the end of the struggle his was the strongest position because his forces had been less trashed than those of all his allies. So he was the one who took power. Which was the only thing that mattered. Extreme ruthlessness paid off.

It’s a tiny forum, of no importance, except to the participants. There’s a philosophical queation there of course.
I was merely suggesting that it might be fun to reset to zero from time to time.
Could become an internet fad?